To Be or Not to Be (in Compliance, that is!)

With many apologies in advance to the liberties taken with the context of Sir William Shakespeare’s work, we pose the following question to you, dear reader:

“To be (in compliance) or not to be (in compliance)? That is the question.”

“Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous lawsuits…”

Or perhaps more to the point of this post, one worries that, “Wise men never sit and wail their loss, but cheerily seek how to redress their harms.”

Anyone following the recent time and labor management news has seen the articles warning that wage and hour lawsuits are on the rise and declaring that something is indeed rotten in Denmark – and every other city. It is no secret that the Department of Labor (DOL) and other government agencies are stepping up efforts to enforce labor laws. By increasing its enforcement budget for fiscal year 2011 and creating jobs for 250 new investigators in just 2010 alone, the DOL has clearly signaled its intent to see that employees are fairly paid. If your company has taken steps to assure wage and hour compliance, well, then you have nothing to worry about.

But if you haven’t, you’d better prepare. Take some simple, disciplined steps now to avoid unnecessary entanglement with the Wage and Hour Division (WHD) of the DOL. Three simple steps – education, delegation, and automation will help companies manage and minimize the potential for a WHD investigation or lawsuit.

Education

Education prepares a company to comply with wage and hour statutes and regulations and prevents unnecessary exposure to risk. A central source of information can be found at the DOL WHD’s web site. Begin by understanding some of the larger issues like FairPay, Recordkeeping Requirements, and Overtime Laws by State. The site provides a great deal of information, guidance, fact sheets and e-tools that can help you navigate the

Automation

Automation minimizes the subjective influence of the human element. Implement a scalable time and labor management solution that consistently applies payroll rules and policies. When implementing an automated time and attendance system, identify and eliminate unwritten expectations and policies that conflict with published policies as well as local, state and federal labor laws and expose the company to compliance liability.

Wage and hour compliance is a very complicated issue. Diligence in education, delegation and automation combined with deliberate and decisive action by management, human resource, and payroll personnel will mitigate the risk to company coffers, capacity and camaraderie.

There are lessons to be learned from Shakespeare, as written in Julius Caesar Act 4:

“There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.”